Sold on a View, New Year’s Revelers Fall to a Forgery Scheme

Getting into the LOL Times Square Comedy Club should not be difficult: Go to Times Square, and when a person with an LOL sign or identification badge approaches you and asks, “Hey, do you like comedy?” say yes. You’re in. Make your way to the club on Seventh Avenue and head upstairs to the windowless bar and black-box theater crowded with tables for two. Enjoy the show.

So the club’s owner and workers and the police were surprised to find the club suddenly become, for one night only, the hottest ticket in the area. So hot that counterfeit tickets started showing up at the doorman’s podium out front. Was a famous comic rumored to be making an appearance?

No. The spike in demand was based not on what was happening inside the club, which is four months old, but rather on what was going on outside. Location, location, location — it was New Year’s Eve, and a few blocks away, a big, bright ball would soon drop slowly down a pole while the world watched.

“I don’t remember in other years having issues like this,” said Lt. Sean Burke, who has worked in Times Square for 12 of his almost 20 years with the Police Department. “This was an unprecedented level.”

The scene played out in front of many revelers, including Robert Judson, a house framer from Rochester who had watched the ball drop on television many times — “our whole life.” He brought his family to Manhattan for the first time last month to see it in person. His experience that night — a chain of hassle and deceit and frustration and empty promises — matched that of many others who thought they held tickets to the club and yet found themselves stranded on the flanks of the famous crossroads.

The Rochester group arrived in Times Square the morning of New Year’s Eve and was met by the familiar question: Do you like comedy?

“They are selling tickets,” Mr. Judson recalled last week. But there was more, the promoter told them. The club offered a prime view of the ball drop. “If we buy tickets for $75 apiece, we can come right out the front door and see from the patio,” Mr. Judson said.

The family members bought five tickets and left the area, thinking they were all set for later and would not have to spend the day in a holding pen like so many other tourists.

They were wrong. When they arrived at West 47th Street and Avenue of the Americas, a long block from the club, they found it blocked off by a police barricade. Officers directed them up the avenue, where they were met by a similar sight at West 48th Street and onward, all the way to West 52nd Street. They asked an officer for help: Lieutenant Burke. He had already seen others in their predicament.

“There’s a whole bunch of people holding the same ticket,” he recalled last week. So he led them back downtown, planning to speak to the officers at 48th Street to allow access to the club to ticket holders.

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A counterfeit ticket to a club in Times Square from which buyers hoped to watch the festivities.CreditJeffrey E. Singer for The New York Times

He noticed people with lanyards and laminated badges selling tickets to the club, holding signs promising “Ball Drop Access,” he said. He heard them tell buyers they would see the ball drop. And more ticket holders had fallen in with his group.

“By now, I’ve got 20 people,” he said. “It’s a parade.”

Officers posted on other corners were reporting that they were also being approached by groups of people with tickets to LOL, Lieutenant Burke said. He led his group to the club’s door.

There, more confusion: Some ticket holders did not have reservations, and others wanted refunds. All were told there was no such thing as “ball drop access” here. A freelance reporter for The New York Times, Jeffrey E. Singer, noticed and chatted with angry ticket holders. Lieutenant Burke led the group from Rochester and other grateful visitors (“If I ever go to Australia, I’ll never pay for a beer”) to a side door of the club and left.

The club’s owner, Roy Arias, was called down. This being his first New Year’s Eve in the location, he admitted he had not accounted for the difficulty that ticket holders would face getting there, he said. But he said he was shocked by what he heard about the promises surrounding the ball drop. After all, there aren’t even windows. He pointed out text on the front of the special New Year’s Eve ticket that read, “You will NOT see the ball drop.”

Then, the larger issue began to unfold. People were showing up at the club with fake tickets. They looked good at a long arm’s length, but up close, they were missing the individual ticket numbers that are present on the real tickets, as well as the perforation along the stub. A man who works with the club, Tyler Fuller, walked to Eighth Avenue to meet another lieutenant who was with a group of ticket holders. He said the lieutenant showed him stacks of tickets that, the lieutenant told him, officers had seized.

Some were photocopies of real tickets, which had been available to the public for a few days. Some were from a previous location for the club. Mixed in were fake identification badges for sellers, the names handwritten under photos. A counterfeiting cottage industry had sprung up around the humble LOL, where the biggest headache is usually a rogue promoter who tells people Louis C. K. is performing to quicker offload his tickets. Then customers vent online.

And the club was not alone in its sudden popularity that night. Two men were selling $50 tickets to a New Year’s Eve party at the pizza chain Sbarro off West 49th Street. A woman who had bought two tickets arrived at the pizzeria ready to party, only to be told there was no party. She flagged the police, who found 140 more tickets in one of the men’s drawstring bags.

Mr. Arias said the ticket sellers did not work for him, but they did buy club tickets in bulk to sell on the street. Ironically, in all the commotion, the club was dead on New Year’s Eve, he said, pointing to unopened cases of liquor in his small office days later. Police officers, finding fake tickets and believing the club was spreading ball-drop misinformation, were not allowing ticket holders to pass barricades, Mr. Arias said. The patrons the club did admit had tickets both real and fake, Jazzlyn Douglas, a manager, said. Five comedians performed to mostly empty rooms.

At midnight, Mr. Arias planned on serving a champagne toast, but the crowd of 40 or so had stepped outside to look up.

By then, Mr. Judson and his group had come and gone. They paid more than $50 for two soft drinks, a margarita and a beer, Mr. Judson said, then left in disgust. Finally, good news: They, along with some other aggrieved ticket holders, were led by the police to a nearby pen.

He thought back days later. What was the highlight of the trip?

“Seeing the ball drop,” he replied. “I wouldn’t take it back for anything.”

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A19 of the New York edition with the headline: Sold on a View, New Year’s Revelers Are Ensnared in a Forgery Scheme. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe